Hi, everybody Recently, a guy noticed that I was using it and asked why? For me it because in Linux many things are done through the terminal because Linux has many different desktop environments
He also compared terminal commands with cheat codes in GTA and other games, he understands what benefits you take from them, but not from terminal commands
If I need to rename a file, yeah, I can do that by right-clicking it in the file explorer, and selecting ‘rename’ from the menu. Two files? Painful but doable. Three files? Oh hell no, I’m switching to my always-open-in-background terminal window, and write a quick c=1; for f in *.jpeg; do mv “$f” $c.jpeg; c=expr $c + 1 ; done and it takes twice less time than clicking things through with mouse.
And yes, I wrote that shell command off the top of my head on the first try and without edits.
I’m sorry, I’m too old to learn emacs over my perfect knowledge of Midnight Commander.
The point of this topic was to tell why we are using terminal, and emacs is kind of terminal on steroids, there are like 1000 key bindings and the mouse is totally optional, you are proving the point even further.
The Thunar bulk renamer is relatively good, but recently I wanted to name images based on the capture date. Probably very tedious without the right GUI tool, while it’s just one line using exiftool in the terminal. (I don’t know it off the top of my head)
Similarly, I just extracted the audio only from a video using ffmpeg in like 10s. ffmpeg -i video.mkv -c:a copy out.mka
Everyone’s different idk. I myself love command line. I have enjoyed Linux for a long time but it didn’t really become my daily driver until recently. I find it very rare that I use the GUI for more than gaming and watching stuff. Everything else is command line. I’ve had friends refuse to try Linux due to the “requirement” of needing to do stuff in command line. When I showed them some newer distros that appeal to users who don’t really feel comfortable with command lines.
Command line is a lot more powerful for a lot of cases. Most CLI programs are written with the idea that the caller might be another program, so they tend to be easy to chain with pipes and redirection. So you have tons of simple tools that you can combine however you need.
For me the difference between a cli and a gui is like asking someone to do something speaking in a language they can understand and doing it just by pointing at things and doing gestures. It's enough for ordering at a restaurant, but for more complex tasks it gets ridiculous, even at a restaurant you'll get better results if you can ask for some information and understand what the server says
Even back in the day when I still used Windows (and GUI almost exclusively) I browsed my filesystems like I'd use a terminal with tab-completion. I'd press the first few letters of the file/directory I was looking for and press enter, rinse and repeat. I knew my file organization by heart anyway. It's only natural for me to drop the GUIs for such use cases.
I use a terminal whenever I'm doing work that I want to automate, is the only way to do something such as certain parameters being cli only, or when using a GUI would require additional software I don't otherwise want.
I play games and generally do rec time in a GUI, but I do all my git and docker work from the cli.
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